With millions of new voters heading to the polls this November and many
states introducing new voting technologies, election officials and
voting monitors say they fear the combination is likely to create long
lines, stressed-out poll workers and late tallies on Election Day.

At least 11 states will use new voting equipment as the nation
shifts away from touch-screen machines and to the paper ballots of
optical scanners, which will be used by more than 55 percent of voters.

About half of all voters will use machines unlike the ones they
used in the last presidential election, experts say, and more than half
of the states will use new statewide databases to verify voter
registration.

With Senator Barack Obama’s
candidacy expected to attract many people who have never encountered a
voting machine, voting experts and election officials say they are
worried that the system may buckle under the increased strain.

“I’m concerned about the weak spots,” said Rosemary E. Rodriguez, the chairwoman of the United States Election Assistance Commission,
which oversees voting. “So much depends on whether there will be enough
poll workers, whether they are trained enough and whether their state
and county election directors give them contingency plans and resources
to handle the unexpected.”

Some areas, including Baltimore, ran
out of paper ballots either in 2006 or in this year’s primaries and
plan to order many more this fall.

Ohio plans to add paper
backups in case its electronic machines break down again, as they did
in 2004, creating long lines. New Jersey, New York and California,
among other states, face shortages of poll workers or the money to pay
for them.

Voting rights advocates are working with officials in
Florida, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania to try to prevent the kind of
ballot design problems that added to the loss of around 12,000 votes in
this year’s presidential primary in Los Angeles County and 18,000 votes
in a 2006 Congressional race in Sarasota County, Fla.

As state
and local election officials scramble to get enough ballots, workers
and equipment to handle the predicted high turnout, many are trying to
ease the strain of Election Day by encouraging voters to cast their
ballots early. But the problems may be complicated by changes to the
lists of eligible voters. Recent purges of voters from registration
lists and the influx of registrations may result in names erroneously
being dropped and eligible voters showing up at the polls to find their
names not on the rolls. (Advocacy groups have encouraged voters to
check their registration with election officials at least two weeks
before the polls open.)

“Election officials are unanimous in
their commitment to ensuring every eligible American’s right to vote,
but in many places the system they oversee simply isn’t designed to
handle anywhere near the number of voters that may turn out,” said Doug
Chapin, director of electionline.org,
a project of the Pew Center on the States. “In previous elections, the
question has been, ‘Will the system work for each voter?’ But this year
the real question is whether the system can handle the load of all
these voters.”

Poll worker training and ballot design will be
more important than ever this year. The election commission has
predicted that at least two million poll workers will be needed in
November, double the number in the 2004 presidential election. In New
Jersey, election officials placed advertisements in newspapers asking
people to sign up to work the polls. In California, election officials
posted pleas on the Internet.

But many states face budget
problems that make it hard to recruit poll workers. New York City
election officials have said they lack the money to pay the estimated
8,000 additional poll workers needed in November. Several states have
resorted to recruiting high school students.

Ms. Rodriguez said
that the high level of turnover in the people who run state and local
elections was also a concern. More than two-thirds of the election
directors in the nation’s 50 largest counties were new to the office in
2004, and the number may be even higher now, according to Election Data
Services, a Washington consulting firm that tracks voting trends.

Many
voters heading to the polls in November will receive a paper ballot for
the first time. The ballots are counted by optical scanners and provide
a more reliable paper trail than touch-screen machines in case of a
dispute or a malfunction.

A third of voters will use touch-screen machines, down from 38 percent
in 2006, while about 55 percent of voters will use paper ballots read
by optical-scan machines, up from 49 percent of voters in 2006, said
Kimball W. Brace, president of Election Data Services.

The main issue with the paper ballots will be their unfamiliarity to
voters, not the technology itself. Ideally, in fact, paper ballots
could reduce lines at polling places, because election officials would
not have to set up a limited number of expensive touch-screen machines
in each booth. Paper ballots require only a writing surface, and far
fewer optical-scan machines are needed to count them.

But poll
workers will have to explain the system to new voters and make certain
to print and distribute enough paper ballots for each polling place. In
the past, shortages of paper ballots or electronic machines have been a
common cause of long lines and people leaving the polling places
without voting, said Adam Fogel, a program director at FairVote, a
voting rights advocacy group.

“For us, the issue isn’t what type of machines will be used but how they are distributed,” Mr. Fogel said.

He
said election officials must be nimble enough to send extra ballots or
machines to precincts experiencing heavy turnouts. But a report to be
released in August by FairVote says that many swing states have been
unable to do that.

The swing states that experienced the longest
lines, including Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania,
lack uniform rules for distributing machines and ballots, the report
says. Most states allocate machines and ballots in August, two months
before most of the major registration drives are completed, according
to the report.

“Allocating enough ballots and machines is a
tricky science under any circumstances, but especially when turnout is
proving to be so unpredictable,” said Tova A. Wang, vice president for
research at Common Cause, a voting rights advocacy group.

In
Baltimore, election officials so underestimated turnout in the 2006
primary that polling places ran out of ballots by midday and voters
ended up using random pieces of paper, including campaign literature,
as ballots, she said.

In Albuquerque, on the other hand, voting
officials overestimated turnout in the primaries last month and had to
shred more than $1.2 million worth of unused ballots, Ms. Wang said,
adding that states should probably still err on the side of ordering
more, not fewer.

Although most of the 30 states with touch-screen
machines still do not plan to provide backup paper ballots, others,
including Ohio, will do so for the first time in a presidential
election. In 2004, hundreds of voters in Knox County, Ohio, many of
them Kenyon College students, had to wait more than nine hours after
one of the two voting machines at their polling place just off campus
broke down. There were reports of lines where the wait was several
hours long in at least three other counties.

“We refuse to let
that happen,” said Jennifer L. Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state,
who plans to instruct all counties that use touch-screen machines to
order backup paper ballots equal to at least a quarter of the votes
cast there in the last presidential election.

Ohio now permits
no-fault absentee voting, Ms. Brunner said, which means voters no
longer have to provide an excuse to cast an absentee ballot, either in
person or through the mail starting 35 days before Election Day.

Thirty
other states permit no-excuse absentee voting and a third of voters
nationally are expected to vote early or absentee in the next election,
experts say.

Larry Norden, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University
School of Law, said he was concerned with the design of this year’s
ballots. Too often, Mr. Norden said, voters are confused by ballots
with instructions written in unclear legal jargon, lists of candidates
that span more than one column, boxes that can be checked on either
side of a candidate’s name, or vague borders that fail to distinguish
one electoral contest from another.

“The bottom line is that new
voters are more prone to mistakes caused by confusing ballots,” Mr.
Norden said. “We’re expecting a lot of new voters in November.”

Jonah
H. Goldman of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said
the high turnout and surge of new voters were likely to cause
bottlenecks as eligible voters arrive at the polls and find their names
are missing from the databases that election officials are using to
check registration.

In the primaries, reports from at least 12 states said eligible voters ran into that problem.

The
new computerized databases, required by a 2002 federal law, were meant
to provide uniformity in how states run elections. By coordinating with
other state lists, officials can more easily remove from the rolls
people who have died, changed residence or been convicted of felonies,
to help reduce fraud. But the purges also occur with little oversight,
and errors can be significant.

Mr. Goldman said his organization
was closely watching Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi,
because those states have purged hundreds of thousands of voters since
2006.